Editor,

Since the advent of free trade agreements like NAFTA, the U.S. has lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs abroad to countries that pay little more than lip service to worker protection and environmental standards. For the most part, corporate America has responded with yawning indifference, arguing that American workers need to “adapt and evolve” to a changing global marketplace and retrain themselves for higher skilled jobs.

The result has been the hollowing out of many communities throughout the country as jobs move offshore and tax bases dissipate.

These days, there seems to be no winning, for even where American workers are the have honed the most advanced technological skills anywhere in the world, our government still seems poised to kick them in the teeth. The U.S. commercial aerospace industry, the envy of the world and the last stronghold of American manufacturing, is a prime example.

The Europeans, particularly the French, have been engaged in what is widely regarded in the U.S. as an illegal and systematic effort to take jobs and market share from American aerospace workers and firms by dumping over $100 billion in subsidies into their own French-based aerospace company, Airbus. “We will give Airbus the means to win the battle against Boeing” pronounced the French Prime Minister a few years ago. And they’ve been effective with this gambit, gaining nearly 50 percent of the market while American manufacturer have shed thousands of U.S. jobs.

For its part, the Bush Administration has rightly responded by filing the largest lawsuit in the history of the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the EU. But, here the Bush Administration is taking one step forward and two steps backwards. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Defense is today poised to countermand the Administration’s own trade negotiators by insisting that Airbus be one of the two competitors in the award for the U.S. Air Force’s crown jewel of airframe contracts n a $40 billion tanker aerial refueling contract.

Boeing’s tanker jet is clearly the state of the art, having gained the lions’ share of customers worldwide and having shown an impressive track record in its service of U.S. troops. The Boeing tanker is American-made and would never be held up or left unsupported by a country whose government suddenly went from ally to enemy. An award to the American manufacturer could support some 44,000 jobs and hundreds of communities here at home.

But, if Airbus wins the contract, the DOD will create tens of thousands of jobs in France and reward the very company that our trade representatives have sued as rogue violators of trade laws.

Without a doubt, DOD needs to replace its refueling aircraft - a point on which there is broad agreement. But, after understandable outrage on Capitol Hill over Boeing’s no-bid contract for the tanker replacement aircraft in 2003, a once-criticized DOD has this time, perhaps over-reacted and gone to the other extreme, insisting that the award must be done on a competitive basis at all costs. The result is that a heavily subsidized European manufacturer will be able to compete with the benefit of billions in government subsidies against a U.S. manufacturer which receives no subsidies.

To a divided Washington bureaucracy, it seems impossible to reconcile free trade with competitive contracting. However, just as American workers have retrained themselves for higher skilled jobs, bureaucrats must retrain themselves as well. Competition may be the fuel of excellence, but if one team is on steroids, then the cause of competition is hopelessly distorted.

Unions such as the International Association of Machinists (IAM) often fight to hold these companies accountable at the bargaining table on matters relating to health care, wages, jobs and benefits. But we similarly expect the federal government to take a stand, insist that the U.S. not be played for a fool, and show the moxie to reconcile competition in contracting with the basic rules of fair play.

Rich Michalski

General Vice President

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers

Upper Marlboro, Md.